And She Lived Happily Ever After

The story in this post was actually used in http://www.solitaryreaping.blogspot.com/ by a very dear friend.

I am posting it here as I think that it is my story. Thanks Ragini ;)

The story goes:Once upon a time, a guy asked a girl 'Will you marry me?' The girl said: 'NO!' And the girl lived happily ever after.She went shopping, dancing, camping, drank martinis, always had a clean house, never had to cook, did whatever the hell she wanted, never argued, didn't get fat, traveled more, had many lovers, didn't save money, and had all the hot water to herself. She went to the theatre, never watched sports, never wore friggin' lacy lingerie, had high self esteem, never cried or yelled, felt and looked fabulous in sweat pants and was pleasant all the time.

Wanted Convent educated tall, fair, slim, homely Girl.

Wanted Convent educated tall, fair, slim, homely Girl.

Every time somebody starts the topic of marriage I can’t help but remember the above headline in the matrimonial columns in every newspaper.

I dread the day when I will be reduced to such a headline…the possibilities are enormous and I say a small prayer every morning when I read the classifieds and don’t see my name or description featured in it.

It’s become a daily battle now to avoid the topic of marriage. Invariable someone or the other brings up the topic and everybody deems me the unfortunate victim, someone who has been passed on and will never know the pleasure of married life. In the same sentence they will crib about their own spouse or married life, but hey that’s another topic, they say.

From relatives and friends with whom I have not spoken to over a decade, all have the same concern or wish… to see me married. So that they can all say in chorus “Another one bites the dust”. It’s as if all the married people in the world are raging a silent war against the single population and they will not rest unless we join the fraternity, unless we pledge alliance to the secret society of unrealized expectations and everlasting nagging.

Why cant they leave me alone, I am big enough to decide whether to tie the knot or not. My Mom has a rejoinder to this “you will always be a kid for us”. I have a counter argument for this “then let me be a kid, why are you trying to get me married, it will amount to child marriage and the laws are against this”. But it doesn’t work with her.

Now my friends have taken a different approach. One wants me to jot down the qualities that I need in my man so that she can go about looking for one. I understand that in the globalized country of ours, it’s easy to find everything under one roof (read shopping mall), but isn’t this taking it too far. But she insists on the list, blissfully enjoying her newly wed status.

Well, Mousumi, I have never refused you…so here is the list.

1. Wit
2. Looks
3. Money
4. Career
5. Body (6 packs are a must…if SRK has it, I want it)
6. Guy should own orange pajamas (kinky pleasureJ)
7. Have a political opinion (if it matches mine, that’s great…but even if it doesn’t-no problem, but should have one… most people I meet don’t have any political opinion of their own, they echo what their peers or family says)
8. Read books…fiction (so that I can borrow and gift him some…it’s the best gift idea!)
9. Watch movies with the same passion as me (here the tastes have to match mine…can’t be with somebody who didn’t think No Smoking was not a great movie.)
10. Enjoy animated stuff with as much passion as me especially Shrek series.
11. Is a foodie, someone who lives to eat and is adventurous with food, since I also need a guinea pig for my cooking experiments
12. Has a passion for travel…andamans, north east, backwaters, ladakh, rajasthan, macchu pichhu, etc
13. Has the time and money to go on such trips with me
14. Should be in love with both the sea and the mountains
15. Should not like Madhuri, Aishwariya and Kareena (cant stand them)
16. Should have a flair for making inane conversations complete with sound effect and animated actions
17. Should understand my jokes
18. Should have Carpe Diem as his philosophy or at least understand the same.
19. Should not be protective or possessive about me
20. Should not talk to me for more than 2 hours in a day
21. Should not be messy
22. Should not throw things on the road
23. Should not encourage beggars
24. Should not avoid embarrassing friends after getting drunk
25. Should not be sober all the time
26. Should not be a drunk all the time
27. Should have tried on various things at least once in life like bhang, grass, etc.
28. Should actually enjoy good alcohol and not be a social drinker only
29. Should have pet peeves
30. Should be independent
31. Should not be mama’s boy
32. Should have loads of friends and actually enjoy being with them
33. Should have at least one major relationship (takes the pressure off me)
34. Should know how to jive (so that I can also shake a leg)
35. Should be active (one lazybones is enough, read me)
36. Should be practical
37. Should be impractical
38. Should be romantic without being mushy
39. Should be metrosexual (getting regular manicure, pedicure and facials is not a bad thing but not more than me)
40. Should love my friends (all of them without exception, even the weird ones)
41. Should give a patient hearing to my all my ideas however weird they may be.
42. Should be willing to be part of my hare brained enterprises
43. Should manage to surprise me
44. Should manage to scare me (few people can do this… this will be a sure fire way to get my attention)
45. Should be willing to yell at me once in a while (again very few people can yell at me)
46. Should be able to be a bigger nautanki than me
47. Should be able to spend time with me without talking
48. Should be able to understand my moods
49. Should be able to understand how much he means to me without me ever saying it
50. Should be a mix of Chandler and Joey (from Friends), Pierce Brosnan (Remington Steele) and Johnny Depp (Chocolat)

There, are you happy now, I have listed down some of the most important points… will keep on adding on to it but I honestly don’t believe that you can go shopping with this list.

Identity Crisis

I want to be known as a person first and a woman later… is this too much to ask or is this too weird a thought?? I don’t have an answer for this…but this question has been playing on my mind ever since a friend confided in me that he would not have spoken to me if I was not a woman, didn’t have dimples and was not single (needless to say that this friend was a guy).

This left me wondering, do we make friendships on the basis of looks only or does the whole package ever count. I went back to my first friend… Mousumi … I remember how I had met her … I was in Prep class and I didn’t have any friends… I used to hang out with my sister and her friends who were 2 years my seniors. They didn’t want me to tag alone as they were seniors and it didn’t do good to their image to be seen with a Junior… so I had started staying away from them instead of putting my sister in a tight spot of choosing over family and friends (she would have chosen me any day...but I would not have the pity, egoistical that I was even at that age).
Anyways I was having lunch all by myself and looking quite lost (btw the looking lost is a permanent expression on my face… not b’coz I am lost but I am wooden and the childhood expression has stuck) when Mousumi struts along and says hi, and asks me if I want to play hopscotch with her (we used to call it KhitKhit). She was not the first person to ask me to join her in some game, but the way she asked me with that smile and that casual way as if it is something she does everyday at the same time with a desperate look that if I refuse, she will be heartbroken was what caught my attention and I have stuck with her ever since. In those days friendship was not about dimples or single status, it was simple need for a friend. We never analyzed why we liked somebody, we just did. In fact, all the above reasoning that I gave for liking Mousumi was as an afterthought in my adult days….how can you expect a 6 year old to read so much into another persons mind…maybe you can, maybe it’s a 6 year olds intuition, maybe it was divine intervention or just plain luck. I don’t know, but the fact remains that we are still very close friends and share our lives with each other. And it helped that at that age I didn’t differentiate between person and woman.

But coming back to the current identity crisis…am I woman first and then a person or a person first and then a woman. Why was I so offended? In this day and age when size zero is the norm and botox enhanced features is the rage, why would I feel offended when someone compliments me on my look. Am I trying to pretend to be someone else, coz I do appreciate any compliments that come my way.

But at the same time, I would like the other person to notice my other attributes namely my thoughts and ideas about certain issues which have nothing to do with the way I look but may have contributed to the person I am. Does this mean that I owe an apology to the person who dared to befriend me on the basis of my dimples? I don’t know, I honestly don’t.

I do acknowledge the fact that I also have a certain filters when I meet somebody that helps me decide whether I would like to meet that person again and a small percentage of it is based on looks. But I would never say that I cultivated a friendship on the basis of looks only. Is this hypocrisy? Aren’t we all looking for an identity that would define us and bring meaning to our lives, so that we can be all labeled, tagged and put up on shelves for our future generations to ‘identify’ us from the rest of the horde? Well, I rather choose dimpled identity over a labeled tag. Major, I owe you an apology.

Kicking the bucket

No no …don’t worry I don’t plan to kill myself… not yet atleast… kicking the bucket is literally kicking the bucket (list) that I made years ago… I haven’t achieved 80 % of the things that I’d listed down… why, beats me… I don’t understand it myself… but it has gotten me depressed…so much so that I have decided to get rid of the bucket altogether… na rahega balti na hogi depression… but alas I cant seem to kick the bucket off… I really want to do all them…but where when how with whom (!!) is a question that I have no answers to…sigh!

Well I can atleast share the list …

1. bungee jumping
2. sailing
3. skiing
4. Skating a bit better than a first timer.
5. firing a rocket launcher
6. owning a gun…hey I’m a single woman, its for protection
7. exercising every day
8. swimming 3 times a week
9. playing a sport – basketball, volleyball, etc
10. Learning how to play TT, Pool.
11. getting 6 packs … this was way before srk made it famous
12. buying a suv
13. having a house of my own
14. Having a bank balance (no, 2k doesn’t count… btw that’s my current balance… I’ve working since the past 8 years, wat did I do with all the supposedly hard earned money??)
15. Heading a network
16. Traveling… I still have not been to the north east, srinagar, ladakh, andamans, jodhpur, jaisalmer, backwaters, Japan, Fiji Islands, Australia, Antarctica, Egypt, Berlin, Moscow, etc
17. Making perfect round chapattis
18. Jiving
19. Playing the drums
20. Visiting Macchu Picchu with my boyfriend
21. Boyfriend??!!
22. Being nice to my sis
23. Being there for my parents
24. Talking to my bro without bullying him
25. Cooking for my parents, sis, extended family
26. Going on a trip/picnic with my family…never enjoyed the trips when I was young… hope that this time it will be fun
27. Visiting all my friends who have been married (all) and I haven’t met them for more than 6 months
28. Buying myself some decent clothes… can’t live in jeans forever, now…and while am at it some decent shoes.
29. Not losing focus
30. Not losing patience when people talk…why can’t everyone be concise and to the point?

Well can I remain at the same age till the next 5 years… take an annual leap every 5 years like all the saas-bahu soaps so that I have more time to do all these... help, plz.

Grass is greener on the other side.

Grass is greener on the other side.

The other day I was chatting with a friend who also happens to be a Major in the Indian army. It was more of a pep talk and agony aunt kind of conversation... he was really dejected with the way the army was treating him. He said that neither was the organization paying him at par with other industries, nor giving him a real posting in siachen but was making him do some exercises in some situation which he felt were not productive enough and on top of it the armed forces were being compared to the civil servants, paper pushers at the most.
That conversation made me very restless and i started thinking (one of the rarer phenomenons in this world) about why Major Saab thought the way he did. If the person responsible for my security has self doubts then I need to be very worried. And on top of that, I saw a story on Times Now that 25 out of every 32 army personnel are deserting the organization. Is this something to lose sleep over, coz i definitely did and am still disturbed. What is the solution for this?
It is a fact that the 6th pay commission has increased the pay packages of the armed forces by 33 percentage excluding allowances. Now lets play devils advocate with whatever little information that I have.

a) Armed forces get 60 days of leave as compared to the corporate sector which get around 30 days of leave per annum.
b) Armed forces get medical facilities for their entire family unlike the corporate sector.
c) Armed forces get subsidized FMCG products and liquor unlike their corporate counterparts.
d) Armed forces can easily avail loans than their corporate counterparts.
e) The kids of armed forces can get admitted in sainik schools unlike civilians who have to pay huge amounts of donations.
f) And to top it all, the armed forces are the least corrupt organization as compared to the civil sector
g) Last but not the least, the respect & charisma that the armed forces command in their uniform can be rivaled only by poster boys like John Abraham.

So why the dissatisfaction?? Is it something to do with the idle mind being the devil's workshop... earlier we had battles to fight and were busy, now with all the free time (yes there is a major counter insurgency operation and fire fighting against natural calamities which are increasing... but that is a separate story)

Or is it the media who is responsible for highlighting the achievements of the corporate sector with reports of starting salaries of IIM grads and/or the the exploits of the Ambani Brothers. It is bound to get in dissatisfaction.

At the same time, comparison with IAS officers who generally do not have threat to their lives (unless they are in some scam and run the risk of being lynched by the public, media or their counterparts) rankles a lot with the men in uniform.

The solution for this is two fold-- one explaining to these rough n tough guys that the grass is greener on the other side... yes it is... i would gladly risk being shot by Pakistani Soldiers than listen to mindless news stories of Naag-Nagin frolicking somewhere (I work for a news channel...hence listening to such stories is part of my job profile... I wish I could switch off the TV). The other solution albeit a bit ambitious is to get a petition and formally make an official protest/complaint against the authorities.

The thought of donating a part of my salary to the army welfare did come to my mind, but better sense has prevailed and I have decided against it. Reasons for not being on their side... I think army people have an easy life... They are waited hand & foot by their orderlies/batman during peace posting. Since, they have field postings every 3 years, in some godforsaken place, they don't have to maintain a lifestyle that we have to. And the biggest factor, they don't have to buy clothes every fortnight, they have uniforms...I waste 10 min every morning deciding what to wear....its a criminal waste of time, considering that I don't end up looking great like the model advertising the same clothes which is why I bought them in the first place... And then, the subsidized liquor rates... why do I have to pay for double the market rate, plus service tax, plus leave a tip, not to mention that whenever I go to a pub, its always with a friend whose tab I'm obliged to pick up... give me army mess any day...hic!

Well, even though I have filled reams of paper against these poor men in uniforms, I know that deep down that they deserve more. They are risking their lives for us so that we can crib about subsidized alcohol and agonize over our clothes. They spend nights waiting in extreme conditions without proper equipment or clothes. Is this why we pay taxes so that the government spends it in throwing stones at each other during assembly sessions.... I am a firm believer of the fact that the government has enough funds to run this country but has dimwits who siphon off the same.

Aarrggghhh... I have lost the thread of what i started out to say... the bottom line is that lets all be honest and sincere in our work ... and follow the sayings of the Gita... Kaam Kar par Phal ke icchah mat rak... in essence one should do one's duties in life as per his/her dharma, or duty, without concern of results. And let their be free flowing alcohol (subsidized or otherwise) to enable this without any hiccups...hic!